Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Yesterday I started an oil painting of a squirrel surrounded by roses. Now I want to go back to colored inks. I know I should pick a method and stick with it, I just don't know which to pick. I think the idea in my head of oil painting as something more serious and important is throwing off my judgement. I love how it looks but without a studio to deal with the mess and toxicness it just stresses me out.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

The other day I got stuck on a reading tangent online about playing card history. I had no idea they dated back to at least the 1300's, probably earlier, and how widespread they were around the world even by that time. The weird thing is how similar the oldest cards look to the common ones we use today.

I can only speculate since I'm not a historian and if I was a time travelor I'd go forward in time to see all the cool stuff that will be invented. But its interesting to think about the place in people's lives these little handheld illustrations played. They're loaded with symbolism which I imagine was even more significant to the spread of ideas in the times before printing was easy and cheap.

It also displays how connected the old world was even without phone or internet or radio. In the 1400's clearly playing cards were all over Europe, but they might have started out in Persia or Egypt or even China. Obviously you couldn't interact across the world in real time, but things still could spread long distances.

I use Google to search. I've tried other engines when it changes, but Google gets faster and better and I keep going back. But I'm not happy.

The problem is I don't want a single search box. That is not how I want to search. Here is an example to illustrate. (It is not the original reason, but hopefully will make the point without telling you what I'm up to.) Let's say I'm going on a vacation to Boston and I want to look up:

weather for the week

museum of science, Harvard and MIT lectures calendar

art museum hours, current shows and locations

map

MBTA price

I want to type that all in at once, press search and go make some tea. Then when I come back, look at these answers and be done. If I have to search in series I'll get distracted, it'll take longer and I'll feel like I've wasted a lot of time researching. A lot of time wasted waiting to get started on the next search.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

"Galactic cosmic rays are one of the most important barriers standing in the way of plans for interplanetary travel by crewed spacecraft." Wikipedia.

I woke up this morning wondering why pilots don't wear uniforms made of protective fiber. And seriously, how much would it cost to fly a lead plane around?

"Today, it costs $10,000 to put a pound of payload in Earth orbit.", says NASA undated. SpaceX says it can do it for $1948.88 low earth orbit and around $5284.32 GTO ($56,500,000÷$10692) if I am understanding the numbers.

Shopping for our next space trip? I'm thinking about a few of these cute wool lead blankets. Although considering Myung-Hee Y. Kim, "Materials with the
most electrons per unit
mass, the least mean
excitation
energy, and the
least tight binding
corrections make
the best energy
absorbers. Thus, liquid
hydrogen
is a favored
material and lead is less efficient as an energy absorber." What is a girl to do.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

If you've seen any post I've made you might have noticed how terrible my photos of my artwork are. There's a reason for this: I take them with my phone in bad lighting.

Presenting my work in a professional looking way that shows it well seems insurmountable. Obviously its not and I'm just being defeatist. I have a scanner that is smaller than any paper I ever use and it creates shadows (and sometimes creases) in a painting if I try to do multiple scans and piece them together. I was looking up larger scanners online but the prevailing advice seems to be to take good photos.

While its a relief that I don't need to buy an expensive scanner, its going to be quite a project to set up a space with perfect lighting. Lucky for me I have a friend with a dslr camera that I'm sure I can borrow.